Bill and God's Excellent Adventure

By JON MEACHAM

Published: October 17, 2004

It is a long-ago afternoon in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and Trish Buckley has just won a blue ribbon in the annual Dutchess County Horse Show. In a box next to Trish's parents sits Franklin D. Roosevelt, squire of neighboring Hyde Park and president of the United States. ''Protocol requires the winner to ride around the ring to receive the plaudits of the spectators,'' Trish's brother recalls. ''When she rode by the president's box, F.D.R. applauded lustily, whereupon Trish abruptly turned her pigtailed head to one side.'' Arriving shortly thereafter in the Buckley box, bearing her ribbon and her riding crop, Trish faced her curious -- and somewhat embarrassed -- father. ''Why didn't you nod to the president?'' he asked. The girl's face was ''pained with surprise'' as she replied, ''I thought you didn't like him!''

Poor Trish. Had the observant brother who remembered this scene -- the showman, sportsman and political soldier William F. Buckley Jr. -- won the ribbon that day, he would have relished paying his respects to Roosevelt. Even at this distance, we can imagine young Buckley riding past the president with great flourish and a jaunty wave. In Bill Buckley's universe, showmen, sportsmen and political soldiers should be known to one another, respected and saluted as fellow voyagers on the seas of the engaged life. Long caricatured as the consummate upper-class conservative -- his ''Masterpiece Theater'' air, his unabashed intellectual self-confidence and his supply of words from the Oxford English Dictionary have made caricature all too easy -- Buckley is a more complicated figure than his prevailing image suggests.

Reading ''Miles Gone By,'' his latest collection of autobiographical pieces, a book of charm and grace and wit, one finds it virtually impossible to envision Buckley as his liberal critics have for so long: as a dark Goldwaterite, even a pro-crypto Nazi (Gore Vidal's phrase), who hides his extremism beneath a sophisticated Manhattan veneer. He is a partisan combatant, a key figure in the right wing's journey from the fringes of American politics to the mainstream -- from, roughly, Joe McCarthy's sweaty brow to Ronald Reagan's sunny smile. But agree or disagree with the conservative creed he helped shape and promulgate, Buckley is the happiest of warriors, an exuberant man of the right, a Roman Catholic who has apparently taken the reassurances of Scripture to heart. ''In the world ye shall have tribulation,'' Jesus says in the Gospel of St. John, ''but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.''

Buckley's world was comfortable from the beginning. His evocations of a childhood spent sailing, swimming and riding are lovely; one can almost hear the din of the 10 Buckley children clamoring on the lawn while their father, a Texan who made money in oil and came east, chooses the evening's red wine from the cellar. Born in 1925, Buckley grew up at Great Elm, a huge house in Sharon, Conn., learned repartee at the family dinner table, was educated privately, went to Yale, served briefly in the Central Intelligence Agency and became one of the most celebrated -- deep breath here -- authors/editors/columnists/pundits/political activists/novelists/Catholic apologists/bons vivants of the American century. His has been a life lived in the spotlight, savoring things that entertained him, fed his ego and tended to his comfort: klieg lights, applauding audiences, Atlantic sails, annual Swiss ski vacations, good wine, a custom-made limousine. He can be an Olympian name-dropper, but if you have to drop names, Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Clare Boothe Luce, Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Horowitz, David Niven, Murray Kempton, William Shawn and Princess Grace are the ones to drop. He loves his family, his fame and his faith; and he loves stories -- especially those drawn from his own remarkable life. ''Only the man who makes the voyage can speak truly about it,'' he writes in ''Miles Gone By.''

Buckley has spoken volumes about his voyages. An inveterate chronicler of his journeys at sea (including a trip to the bottom of the North Atlantic to see the ruins of the Titanic), he has also charted his soul's journey in ''Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith.'' As a writer of fiction he created Blackford Oakes, the handsome, Yale-educated spy, and has also written novels about, among other things, McCarthyism and Elvis Presley. ''Miles Gone By'' is an elegant book, one of Buckley's best, and the man the reader meets in these pages is the Platonic ideal of a dinner companion, a raconteur whose pomposity is calculated and whose self-deprecation charms.

IN the long run, Buckley, who retired this year from National Review, the magazine he founded, after five decades, will be remembered as a man of ideas who took his show on the road and into the arena. In the most elite educated circles after World War II, being a conservative was pretty much out of the question. The right was still reeling from its isolationist stand against F.D.R.'s engagement in the war against totalitarianism and had lost the essential argument over the expanded role of government in American life: the work of the Eisenhower presidency was less about undoing the New Deal and the Fair Deal than it was about managing the growth of the state. Even when conservatives' instincts were right, as they were in the battle against Communism, they seemed (with a good deal of justice) extreme, paranoid, overreaching.